title: Extracting salient sublexical units from written texts: "Emophon," a corpus-based approach to phonological iconicity.
abstract: A GROWING BODY OF LITERATURE IN PSYCHOLOGY, LINGUISTICS, AND THE NEUROSCIENCES HAS PAID INCREASING ATTENTION TO THE UNDERSTANDING OF THE RELATIONSHIPS BETWEEN PHONOLOGICAL REPRESENTATIONS OF WORDS AND THEIR MEANING: a phenomenon also known as phonological iconicity. In this article, we investigate how a text's intended emotional meaning, particularly in literature and poetry, may be reflected at the level of sublexical phonological salience and the use of foregrounded elements. To extract such elements from a given text, we developed a probabilistic model to predict the exceeding of a confidence interval for specific sublexical units concerning their frequency of occurrence within a given text contrasted with a reference linguistic corpus for the German language. Implementing this model in a computational application, we provide a text analysis tool which automatically delivers information about sublexical phonological salience allowing researchers, inter alia, to investigate effects of the sublexical emotional tone of texts based on current findings on phonological iconicity.
authors.affiliation: Department of Experimental and Neurocognitive Psychology, Freie Universität Berlin Berlin, Germany ; Cluster of Excellence "Languages of Emotion," Freie Universität Berlin Berlin, Germany.
authors.forename: Arash
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Aryani
authors.forename: Arthur M
authors.initials: AM
authors.lastname: Jacobs
authors.forename: Markus
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Conrad
keywords: foregrounding; neurocognitive poetics; phonological iconicity; sound symbolism; text analysis tool